Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 Performance Preview

We took a look at Intel’s first 45nm desktop offering a few weeks ago and already have a preview of it’s successor. The QX9770 is equipped with a 3.2GHz frequency and is the first Intel CPU to support a 1600MHz Front-Side-Bus. Read on to see how it compares to the rest of our fleet.

Gaming: Call of Duty 4, Crysis

Our two newcomers to our gaming arsenal is Call of Duty 4 and Crysis, two titles that are absolutely mind-blowing in both graphics and gameplay. It’s not too often that gorgeous games play well, but Infinity Ward and Crytek really know what they are doing. For precise settings used throughout testing, please refer to our testing methodology page.

Call of Duty 4

We have used Call of Duty 2 in our testing since its release, so it’s great to finally change the scenery a bit now that the fourth installment is available. I admit that I am not terribly fascinated with war-based games, but CoD4 does well to excite during benchmarking. It might be one title I will actually go back and play through, and that says a lot!

The level chosen for testing is The Bog, which begins you out among friends on a destroyed bridge in the heat of battle. This is a level to use in order to push your computer to the limits. The level is one of the most visually appealing I’ve seen (though dark), but has intense action that will stress both the processor and GPU.

While CoD4 is multi-core alert, it doesn’t do much to take advantage of the Quad-Cores, as the results here are pretty congruent all around. This is good news for those of you who own a first-generation C2D… it will suffice for this game.

Crysis

Do games this hyped really need an introduction? Crysis is one of the first games we’ve seen in a while that actually does a great job of pushing the highest-end computers to their breaking point. This is far from a joke. I would love to see a $10,000 e-peen PC run this game like butter at 2560×1600. Maybe next year, but I’d be hard-pressed to see that happen right now.

Because we just added the game to our fleet, the level used is the first one in the game. Instead of beginning right at the beginning when you jump out of a plane, we crated a save on the beach, where is where we begin each time. The manual playthrough ends after about four minutes, after the second area that requires the super-jump.

You are free to laugh heartily at our 2560×1600 results. It’s hard to believe that on a top-of-the-line Quad-Core processor and 8800GTX card, we muster only 15FPS. Not even! Despite that, it’s great to know that Crysis is a game we will be using for benchmarking for the next two years.